Switched Ethernet technology has continued evolving beyond the initial 10 Mbps (bit per second). Gigabit Ethernet technology complying the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 1000BASE-T Standard (IEEE 802.3 2002-2002) meets demands for greater speed and bandwidth of increasing network traffic. Gigabit over Copper technologies provides high performance in the Enterprise local area network (LAN) and accelerates the adoption of Gigabit Ethernet in various areas, such as server farms, cluster computing, distributed computing, bandwidth-intensive applications, and the like. Gigabit over Copper technologies can be integrated into the motherboard of a computer system, and many server makers are offering integrated Gigabit over Copper ports, which is also referred to as LAN on Motherboard.
Gigabit Ethernet works seamlessly with existing Ethernet and Fast Ethernet networks, as well as Ethernet adapters and switches. The 1 Gbps (i.e., 1000 Mbps) speeds of Gigabit Ethernet are 10 times faster than Fast Ethernet (IEEE 100BASE-T), and 100 times faster than standard Ethernet (IEEE 10BASE-T). 10 Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE) enables Gigabit to be migrated into an Enterprise LAN by providing the appropriate backbone connectivity. For example, 10 GbE delivers a bandwidth required to support access to Gigabit over Copper attached server farms.
Switch fabrics and packet processors in high-performance broadband switches, such as Gigabit Ethernet switches or line cards, typically run at a fraction of their rated or maximum capacity. That is, typical processing loads do not require the full capacity of the switch fabrics and packet processors. Thus, it would be desirable to provide a scheme to allow such switch fabrics or packet processors to “oversubscribe” data to achieve more efficient usage of the processing capacity, where oversubscription means that the capacity of the data feed is larger than the capacity of data processing or switching.